Explores “why” people take on leadership roles –
their personal drivers

Explores what people really want to achieve as
leaders – their personal purpose

Addresses two critical questions:
How to get staff learning and therefore improving their performance?
And How to get staff to adopt new listening and questioning behaviours (to
increase collaboration and creativity)?

Starts from the premise that, for
this to happen, something completely new is required in the way we lead people
and manage organisations

Enables organisations to improve
productivity and results through a different approach to engaging people

Utilises the latest learning from
the way our brains work – it enables shifting of our brain’s locus of control
– not just attitudes and / or behaviour but the thinking process

Is extremely practical and can be
applied immediately in any leadership situation

Utilises behaviours – and
behaviours can be learned

Harnesses the energies of
everyone involved while fostering individual and team accountability and
responsibility

Develops a true “learning
organisation”

Leads directly to an effective,
easy to apply, and thorough performance management system that conforms to the
criteria stated by a Wharton Business School report (dated April 2011) for
an overall performance management process -- one
that focuses on goal setting, feedback, coaching and clear statements of the
company's performance expectations - which is absolutely critical" and indeed,
is found in the highest-performing companies

The
Canadian singer-song writer, Leonard Cohen, has a song “Everybody Knows”. In
this Cohen is pointing out everybody knows what is going on – especially when
things aren’t working – but no-one is prepared to do anything about it. We
continue doing the same things – possibly with some “tweaking” but basically
still the same – and wonder why there is no real improvement.

The
issues of leadership and employee engagement are no different.

There
is always a lot of talk about the need for leadership and lots of discussion
about employee engagement – but we continue to use models that were developed in
the 20th century and which have no comprehension of the complexity
existing today and which take little or no account of the social media
revolution and the impact this has had on access to information and
accountability.

Everybody knows that the world is different today from what it was even 10 years
ago – but we try to carry on as though the usual models can still work as well
as they used to.

Third Generation Leadership does something about it.

First
Generation Leadership is all about command and control – do what I say when I
say it and in the manner I instruct you to use. Failure to obtain desired
results or any disobedience is punished. This is the basis of most leadership
approaches today. It has stood the test of time and is a wonderfully useful tool
for those who have a need to be in total control and who see “being reasonable”
as “do it my way.” We throw up our hands in horror when anyone suggests that
this is used today but talk to almost anyone outside of middle and upper
management and it is clear that they have very little doubt about the reality
and commonality of this approach.

Second Generation Leadership is an evolution from this. It uses much the same
approach but dresses things differently. Second Generation Leadership is all
about conformance – fit in with the culture of the organisation and, at least on
the surface, give allegiance to your boss and organisation even if such
allegiance may be rewarded by redundancy or minimal remuneration increases when
things get tough. Don’t rock the boat and certainly don’t seriously question
what is happening. Of course, failure to conform has a high probability of
seeing Second Generation Leadership supplanted by its underlying core – First
Generation Leadership.

We
know all this. As Cohen says, “everybody knows”. Yet we continue as though this
is the way things have to be. The result is an increasingly disenfranchised work
force, unacceptable levels of labour turnover, and organisational productivity
and performance well below where it could be.

The
system is broken and well past the stage where modifications and temporary fixes
can be effective.

And
that’s where Third Generation Leadership comes in!

Over the years
there have been emphases on leadership traits, leadership attitudes and
leadership behaviours. Much research has been done into each of these and myriad
books have been written explaining why one or the other (or what combination of
the three) is necessary for effective leadership. For some 50 years there have
been leadership training programs of varying degrees of effectiveness and
quality and there are champions and success stories for every approach that has
been developed.

We needed the work
done by this research and these programs.

Today the
developing study of neuroscience has enabled us to look at things a little
differently. One key issue that has arisen from this science relates to the
brain’s locus of control.

Traditional
approaches to leadership have not paid large amounts of attention to the world
of neuroscience – mainly because the research that enables us to have these new
understandings was not possible until relatively recently. Accordingly we have
been given models of leadership that are based on physical or character traits,
attitudes, and/or behaviours. We have been told that the activities of a leader
are contingent on the situation in which the leader finds him or herself; we
have learned that we can develop new attitudes; and we have been told to develop
appropriate habits in order to provide effective leadership. Almost all of the
approaches that have been developed are underpinned by serious, peer reviewed
research and they stand up to serious scrutiny. They have been used effectively
by individuals and organisations across the globe with, understandably,
differing cultures finding some leadership approaches more appropriate than
others. They have made a powerful contribution to the way in which we lead
people today whether in the military, business, school, society at large, or in
the home.

What modern
neuroscience has done is to enable us to put another layer to the leadership
process. By understanding how the brain’s area of control impacts on our
everyday behaviour and by learning how to manage down the red zone while
simultaneously managing up the blue zone we are able to take a new look at the
whole concept of leadership and to discover totally new ways of dealing with the
issues that we are facing today as well as those that will emerge in coming
years.

In this first
decade of the 21st Century, we have encountered a situation in which
the working hours of western industrialised countries seem to be increasing.
There seems to be an assumption that employees, particularly in "white collar"
jobs, should be prepared to work whatever hours are required to achieve results
set by their bosses. Very often it seems that those in management and executive
positions are expected to be available 168 hours a week and to have no other
interests or involvements other than their work.

The French have a
proverb which goes something like "plus les changes plus les choses les
memes" - the more things change, the more they stay the same.

We need a new approach – something that is a real
change in the way we do things. We need to move to a Third Generation Leadership
world.